the Delta Star (1983) Read online

  The BMW made an illegal U-turn, then another, and parked in a red zone outside the tavern. This way the detective could take a peek through the greasy tavern window every few minutes and make sure some gypsy wasn't ripping off his goddamn Blaupunkt radio. The BMW was the greatest luxury he had ever owned and had been mostly earned by working off-duty jobs as a security officer at Dodger Stadium. The moonlighting earned him over $13 an hour when the Dodgers were in town, but had cost him two Blaupunkts to the bands of gypsies who paid two bucks to get in the stadium parking lot, and in one night could burgle a dozen BMWs, Audis and Mercedeses for their Blaupunkts, sold easily on fche street for 150 bucks a pop.

  He'd spent more time at Dodger Stadium than Tommy Lasorda, earning enough to buy that goddamn car. After his second divorce, when he was left as bankrupt as Braniff Airlines, he experienced a tremendous desire to own something of value. He was pushing thirty-nine then, and a mid-life crisis on top of the divorce was making him goofy. Now his BMW wasn't brand-new anymore and he was awaiting his forty-second birthday and the mid-life crisis wasn't getting any better. All he thought of was aging. When he wasn't thinking of The Alternative.

  Mario Villalobos then thought about turning around and getting back in that BMW and driving straight to his crummy West Hollywood apartment. But he had to admit it: he wanted to see someone more miserable than himself. This was where to find them on Mother's Day. Already a bit drunk, he staggered into the smoke and gloom.

  "Happy Mother's Day, all you mothers!" he said boozily.

  The only one to look up was Dilford, who was blitzed but not as blitzed as his partner Dolly, who continued her litany of grievances against Dilford, who was drunk enough to find her bad-mouthing less boring than watching Hans the K-9 cop make periodic trips into the next room to try to roust Ludwig, who had gotten sick and tired of all this human bullshit and crawled up on the pool table to go to sleep.

  "... and that's what I think a that, Dilford," Dolly yelled in her partner's ear. "And another thing-how the hell would you like it wearing a goddamn flak vest that's made for a man? I got tits, you ever noticed. And nice ones, I been told."

  "So whaddaya want," Dilford sniffed, "a bulletproof vest designed by Frederick's of Hollywood? And something I don't like: do you gotta wear double pierced earrings? It's sickening enough after three years on the job to be working with five-foot mini-cops that wear earrings, let alone two earrings in each ear!"

  Jane Wayne and The Bad Czech were doing an imitation of a slow dance on the three-coffin dance floor. One groupie was out cold on the bar and the one with fat-handles, who dressed like a thieves' market in Cairo, was trying to persuade Hans to leave the mutt and take her out to the car for a quickie, a suggestion that shocked Hans. Not the quickie, but leaving Ludwig. Which was why he tried unsuccessfully to arouse the Rottweiler every few minutes. Ludwig had spent many an evening sleeping in the front seat of some groupie's car while Hans was at play in the back. Not so this night.

  Hans was second generation from Diisseldorf, but had never spoken German at home and knew about as much of the language as he could get from WW II movies. Still, he affected a good accent, loved dogs madly, and quickly picked up the handful of German commands he needed to con the immigrant dog into thinking he was a real kraut.

  "Fuss, Ludwig! Bitte" Hans pleaded, "wake up, baby." Kee-rist, the fat groupie was starting to look good! "Fuss, Ludwig! Fuss!

  "Why ya give him so fuckin much beer?" the groupie whined.

  "Why you have to say it's so cute and encourage me?" Hans whined right back at her.

  Which caused Jane Wayne to break the clinch of The Bad Czech, who was hanging on for all his might to keep from falling. She playfully dipped him at the conclusion of the dance, and she looked at the snoring Rottweiler sound asleep on his back, one ear hanging in the corner pocket of the pool table, lips flopping upside down baring tiger fangs, snoring louder than the groupie on the bar top.

  Then, Ludwig, deep in some canine dream or fantasy, did what he often did in his sleep. He began to grow a wet, pink, pony-sized erection. Which caused a groupie staggering out of the women's room to say, "Goddamn. Just like my old man. Errol Flynn when he's asleep. Awake, Liberace. Shit!"

  I'm getting out of here right now, Mario Villalobos thought. But before he could go, Leery, all business, set a double shot of vodka in front of the detective and said, "Happy Mother's Day, Mario!"

  And in truth Leery was always delighted to see the detective. Straight vodka drinkers could put it away. The detective already had an $80 bar tab this week.

  "Show me a straight vodka drinker, I'll show you a guy on his way out," Leery always said. And he liked to get it all before they ended up at the veterans' hospital, or Forest Lawn.

  "Got all the losers of the world in one place tonight," Mario Villalobos observed, putting the double shot down much too fast, causing the saloonkeeper to leer happily and pour him another.

  "Business ain't too bad, ain't too bad," Leery said, then glanced toward the other room where Jane Wayne and The Bad Czech were waxing nostalgic and trying to boogaloo. "Wish Hans wouldn't bring that dog in here no more," he added anxiously. "Used to be Ludwig was good for business. Lapping up suds and all. Now it ain't so cute. Him sleeping on the pool table all the time. Screws up the felt. Slobber and dog hair. And what would Internal Affairs do if they caught Hans turning that dog into a alky?"

  "That dog, complete with training, is probably worth several thousand dollars," Mario Villalobos said. "Which makes him more valuable to the city than every other loser in this place put together." Then, feeling malevolent, the detective added, "Which means there'd probably be a crusade on the part of the super chief himself to close down this little house of misery and send you packing to Sun City, where you oughtta be at your age with all the money you got stuffed in your mattress."

  While the detective massaged his aching eyes and felt the vodka headache coming on, Leery chewed on that one. Sun City? Limping around a freaking golf course with all the other geezers? Not making any more money? Spending twenty-four hours a day with his wife Lizzy? Jesus Christ!

  "Hans! Pull yourself together, goddamnit!" Leery suddenly yelled. "Get that freaking animal off the pool table! Achtung, Ludwig! Achtungr Leery yelled.

  And while Leery ran into the poolroom trying to roust the unconscious Rottweiler, with no help from Ludwig's partner, who was putting his best move on the groupie with fat-handles (who was so drunk she thought Hans was The Bad Czech, which was like comparing a dinghy to a battleship) the detective reached over the bar and poured himself half a tumbler of vodka. On the house. Which would have given Leery a heart attack had he seen it.

  Rumpled Ronald looked at his watch and said, "Twelve-oh-five, Mario. I'm forty-seven hours and fifty-five minutes from owning my own pink slip!"

  "Congratulations," the detective said. "You oughtta take that pension and go to Sun City with Leery. Bound to be lots of misery in a retirement community. Arthritis. Strokes. Cancer. Real need for a joint like this."

  "Hope it don't rain," Rumpled Ronald said. "Looked like rain a while ago. What if it rains and I get killed in a traffic accident on wet streets? Wouldn't that be something? Forty-seven hours away. Jesus! You seen a weather report?" And the rumpled cop ran to the window looking for lightning flashes. Seeing none, he returned to his stool and tossed back a double shot of bourbon.

  Then the detective started tuning in the various conversations at the bar. It meant that his loneliness was getting scary. He usually just mumbled and nodded at anything that was said so as not to offend the speaker on the next stool who was usually too drunk to give a shit anyway.

  A fat cop with red hair suddenly got maudlin and tearfully announced, "My wife's screwing a nigger! Can you believe it?"

  Which caused Cecil Higgins, a grizzled black beat cop, to say, "You shouldn'ta married a nigger."

  "No offense, Cecil," the maudlin cop said. "I didn't see you there in the dark."

  "Next tim
e I'll click my eyeballs so's you can see me," Cecil Higgins said. Then he turned to the detective and said, "Better call the A. A. hotline, Mario. That sucker ain't gonna make it two blocks, he's drivin. Sucker's too drunk to walk, even."

  The detective's eyes started to ache even more. Was it the smog? Or the ever present smoke in Leery's Saloon? The ache seemed to originate behind the eyes. He took down half the tumbler of vodka, sighed several times and massaged his temples. Then he saw The Gooned-out Vice Cop.

  The vice cop was staring at his own reflection in Leery's broken bar mirror, recently shattered by The Bad Czech, who after reading a particularly disturbing editorial in the Los Angeles Times folded up the newspaper and threw it across the saloon, turning the pub mirror into a spider web. Some said it was the most remarkable feat of strength ever seen in Leery's Saloon. Others said it just attested to the weight of the Times, which contained more ads than a Sears catalogue.

  The vice cop looked at himself among the webbed cracks, and his image was fractured. The eyes didn't line up. Part of his soft blond beard was growing from where his forehead should be. The vice cop turned his head from time to time, seeming fascinated with the way the fractured image of himself moved illusively through the shards and shadows. He moved his delicate face ever so slightly. He had large black pupils. Eyes like bullet holes.

  Mario Villalobos watched the bearded young vice cop, who wore a tank top and clam diggers and had a string of turquoise beads tied around one lank strip of shoulder-length sandy hair. A matching turquoise band was tied around his throat. He looked very unlike the others who, being uniform cops from Rampart day watch, dressed more conventionally in cotton shirts, jeans, and jogging shoes or cowboy boots. Virtually every male in the saloon also wore a heavy macho moustache, almost as much a part of the bluecoat's accouterment as the off-duty gun under the shirt. The L. A. P. D. owned more moustaches than the Iraqi army. Only the detective and Hans the K-9 cop were cleanshaven.

  "Where's he work?" the detective asked Cecil Higgins.

  And the old beat cop, who had been staring into the bottom of his empty Scotch glass said, "Who? The Gooned-out Vice Cop? I hear he works Hollywood. Been coming in here 'bout three weeks now. Don't talk much. Likes to stare at hisself in the mirror. I think he's gooned out most a the time. On ludes or somethin. Pretty weird dude. Jist looks in that fuckin mirror. Goony. Like all the young cops comin on the job these days. I don't talk to em less I have to. I don't know why he don't go to Chinatown or Hollywood or somewheres to do his thing."

  "What's his name?" the detective asked.

  "Gooned-out Vice Cop is all I know him by," Cecil Higgins shrugged.

  After twenty years on the department, the detective didn't like to see quiet policemen who sat and stared with eyes like bullet holes. He didn't like it one bit.

  Just then Leery snapped him out of it. "Achtung, Ludwig! Achtungl" Leery screamed.

  "Goddamnit, Leery, shut up!" The Bad C^ech yelled, trying to hear David Bowie, who was singing about cat people. "You're gettin on my nerves yellin at that mutt!"

  "Hans, get that dog outa here or I'm closing this joint right now!" Leery yelled to the bombed-out K-9 cop, who was being held up on the barstool by the fat groupie, who was starting to think it was going to be a long night.

  "Elite, Ludwig, bitte," Hans mumbled as Leery warily poked the snoring Rottweiler with a pool cue and said, "Achtung!

  "Slap that dog upside the jibbs," said The Bad Czech, who wouldn't even have dared to poke Ludwig with the pool cue, so frightened was he of the huge Rottweiler, a breed of dog with such incredible jaws that its bite pressure was more than twice that of a Doberman. And theoretically could sever a human arm.

  Then the detective noticed something extraordinary. The Gooned-out Vice Cop began a silent conversation with the fractured image in the mirror. At first the dctective thought he was lip-syncing to David Bowie. But he wasn't. He was sitting erect on the barstool, so that the spider web of broken shards turned his face into a Picasso portrait. Part of the glow from a neon tube advertising a defunct brewery cast a ghastly green across the shards in his fractured image. The Gooned-out Vice Cop nodded very slightly and spoke to the image. At least his lips moved, and the detective, who was getting drunker by the minute, shook his head to clear it. He stared hard across the barroom and tried to see what the vice cop was saying to the mirror image.

  But then all hell was about to break loose. Leery had begun to panic as he thought of what would happen if Internal Affairs Division got wind of a valuable police dog drunk on his pool table. Not to mention a saloon full of zombies, all of whom were half a fifth past the point of Leery losing a liquor license for serving them. And Leery got a flash of the chief of police himself jerking his liquor license off the wall and sending him into retirement to Sun City and twenty-four hours a day with his wife Lizzy and ...

  "That is fucking it!" Leery shrieked suddenly. "I ain't taking this shit! Look! Just look!"

  It caused quite a stir even among those zombies who could barely lift their heads. Ludwig, deep within a canine dream or fantasy, had begun to moan, softly at first, and then with feeling.

  And had begun ejaculating. Right on Leery's pool table, on the felt, right by the side pocket.

  "Czech, you got nothing on Ludwig," said Jane Wayne admiringly.

  "Like my old man. When he's asleepl" said the fat groupie disgustedly.

  "Know why dogs lick their own balls?" said The Bad Czech profoundly. "Cause they can."

  "Fuss, Ludwig! Bittel" Hans cried hopelessly. "Please don't jizz on Leery's table!"

  Then, pandemonium! When Leery saw the jizz he lost his temper and gave Ludwig a hell of a poke with the pool stick, right in the ass. The Rottweiler rose up with a roar that sounded like a space shuttle blast-off.

  Leery dropped the pool cue and went over that bar like no man seventy years old. Jane Wayne broke down a door crashing into the men's room. The Bad Czech screamed in horror and drew down on the Rottweiler, pointing his two-inch Colt with both trembling hands. Ludwig sat upright on the pool table and roared, his huge head bumping against the hanging light and sending fearful shadows across the barroom full of terrified people.

  Then, as fast as it had begun, the terrible roar subsided. Ludwig growled a bit and blinked his yellow menacing eyes, which were full of sleep and bloodshot from the smoke and booze. Then he plopped back down. In a few seconds he was snoring again.

  And The Bad Czech was reholstering his gun shakily. And cops were walking, running, crawling out of The House of Misery.

  The detective had a crazy thought when he unlocked his BMW, happy to see that no roving gypsy had ripped off his Blaupunkt. He remembered telling a professor in a police science class he once took at UCLA that police work wasn't a science. It is and always will be an art, he had claimed. As he watched them staggering, sliding, weaving to their cars he remembered making that observation. And he thought it over. These? These are artists?

  Then the detective saw The Gooned-out Vice Cop. He wasn't getting into a car like the others. He was walking, no, floating down Sunset Boulevard. He seemed to be floating leisurely along the sidewalk into the darkness, his eyes like bullet holes.

  Mario Villalobos' own eyes started to ache again. He needed a good night's sleep desperately. He unlocked his BMW and got in. But he wondered: what the hell did The Gooned-out Vice Cop see in that mirror?

  The last sound the detective heard from The House of Misery was Leery's anguished cry: "Achtung, Ludwig! Achtungl"

  Chapter TWO

  THE HANGING WINO

  THe bad czech was really cranky the next day. He had an awful headache. The base of his skull hurt, both temples hurt, and the top of his head, where his heavy black hair was parted by a cord of white scar (compliments of an NVA mortar fragment at Khe Sanh), hurt most of all. Even his eyebrows seemed to hurt. There was nothing like the central city, growling and farting and belching forth a pall of smoke and pollution, for intensifying an already b
rutal hangover. The Bad Czech lurched along his beat on smog-choked Alvarado Street with the old black cop Cecil Higgins, and looked like he might commit murder. Which he tried to do within the hour. And which he finally managed the next day.

  But before attempting murder and finally succeeding, The Bad Czech had a rather normal morning. First order of business for the two beat cops was to stagger into Leo's Love Palace, an Alvarado bar frequented by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Dominicans and Salvadoreans. Leo, a Pima Indian, despised all the greasers even more than he despised the huge paleface and the old nigger now looking at him with agony in their bloody eyes. Leo started mixing up the morning Alka-Seltzer for the beat cops without being asked.

  Three Salvadoreans boogied out the back door before finishing their beers, causing Cecil Higgins, who had just removed his police hat and was massaging his aching bald head, to say, "Musta been a good hit on Sy's Clothing Store over the weekend. Those three was all wearin Calvin Kleins."

  "Oh my head!" The Bad Czech moaned. "I'm feelin main-street pain. Don't talk too loud, Cecil."

  As The Czech said it, he drank down the Alka-Seltzer, moaned again, and was licking the foam from his wiry black moustache when a black Puerto Rican came finger-popping through the door listening to station KROQ with two shiny new radios blaring music in his ears. He saw the two hungover blue-coats at the bar, said, "Uh oh," and highballed it back out onto Alvarado.

  "Shee-it," Cecil Higgins said. "That sucker's the fifth thief I seen this mornin with brand new ghetto blasters glued to his fuckin ears. Raymond's Stereo Center musta got raped over the weekend."

  "I gotta get some fresh smog in my lungs or I'm gonna die, Cecil," The Bad Czech whimpered, and lurched out of Leo's Love Palace onto the busy sidewalk, the older cop following along behind, still rubbing his loose bald scalp.